Paris Skyline Gets a Greenover

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The Paris skyline is about to get a pretty big makeover. A space currently being used as a parking lot at the city’s edge will soon be transformed into a one-of-a-kind, eco-friendly, “floating village.” Though this floating village may not get quite as much air as the one from Gulliver’s Travels, residents and visitors will certainly feel like they’re soaring as they find themselves at eye-level with the city’s skyscrapers and the Eiffel Tower.

Blanketed with over a thousand trees, the elevated town provides a contrasting green space against an industrial backdrop. And like most good things (chips and dip, cake, Trident gum, etc.), this structure has several different layers. The top layer will house all the homes – 127 of them, to be exact. The second layer provides a walkway and outdoor public spaces for pedestrians. Located alongside a major highway, this walkway will link Paris to the outskirt towns, making the city center more accessible to people in the burbs. And on the third layer there’s, well, everything else. Here you can find office buildings, restaurants, shops, day care centers, and more. Yeah, I wasn’t kidding when I called this place a village – it has everything!

Looks like the City of Lights is about to get a little greener! Click here to browse some of our most popular tours of France.

What makes this even cooler is that it’s 100% eco-friendly. The structure will run on a combination of solar, wind and geothermal energy generated by the village, for the village. An “energy loop” will run throughout the entire complex, so if a restaurant produces extra energy that isn’t being used that energy can then be transferred to a home, or vice versa. You know what they say…no watt left behind!

“What we really want to do is create a living ecosystem,” says Manal Rachdi, founder of Paris-based Oxo Architects. They partnered with Japanese designer Sou Fujimoto to bring the floating village blueprints to life. Construction is expected to begin within the next two years, and will be completed in 2021 or 2022.